Cognitive Science

As a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be...

We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself.

New research from Northwestern Medicine offers strong evidence that the brain uses predictive coding to generate predictive templates of specific smells -- setting up a mental expectation of a scent before it hits your nostrils.

While there's no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks' character famously proclaimed in A League of Their Own, crying in college football might not be a bad thing, at least in the eyes of one's teammates.

Alberta School of Business researcher Sarah Moore and colleagues from Duke and Cornell universities say that unconscious feelings about objects in the environment influence the pursuit of long-term goals.

A new study of itch adds to growing evidence that the chemical signals that make us want to scratch are the same signals that make us wince in pain.

The brain is apparently programmed from birth to develop the ability to determine sunrise and sunset, new research on circadian rhythms at the University of Chicago shows.

In an upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Gabriel and graduate student Ariana Young show what that something is: When we read, we psychologically become part of the community described in the narrative—be...

Unconsciously, right-handers associate good with the right side of space and bad with the left. But this association can be rapidly changed, according to a study published online March 9, 2011 in Psychological Science.

Northwestern University scientists have discovered a new mechanism in the core gears of the circadian clock. They found the loss of a certain gene, dubbed "twenty-four," messes up the rhythm of the common fruit fly's sleep-wake cycle, making it harder...

Most of us are familiar with the idea of image compression in computers. File extensions like .jpg or .png signify that millions of pixel values have been compressed into a more efficient format, reducing file size by a factor of...

People tend to overestimate the steepness of slopes – and psychologists studying the phenomenon have made a discovery that refutes common ideas about how we perceive inclines in general.

Humans are notoriously bad at predicting their future happiness. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that part of the reason for these mispredictions lies in failing to recognize the key...